Five dead in Finland after gunman goes on shopping centre rampage

A gunman dressed in black shot five people dead in Finland today before turning the weapon on himself. Ibrahim Shkupolli shot his ex-girlfriend in her apartment in the city of Espoo, west of Helsinki, before opening fire in a busy shopping centre, sparking a hunt that ended when police found his body.

The shooting is likely to lead to further soul-searching over gun laws in Finland, where two killings in the past 25 months have already led to a tightening of gun ownership laws.

Panic erupted at the Sello shopping centre at around 10am (8am GMT) today. Hundreds of shoppers were evacuated after Shkupolli, 43, shot four staff – a woman and three men – at the Prisma supermarket. One unnamed witness said he appeared to have opened fire at random.

"There were loads of people who were crying, and many vendors who were completely panicked," the witness told the national broadcaster, YLE.

Another witness said she saw the suspect rushing through a supermarket carrying a long-barrelled handgun.

Helicopters clattered overhead as the shopping mall – one of Scandinavia's largest – was evacuated and trains to the nearby Leppävaara station were stopped.

As officers sealed off the area, a body was found in a nearby apartment. Police confirmed it was Shkupolli's ex-girlfriend, who was also a mall employee. Officers said the 43-year-old had killed her before heading to the shopping centre.

The search for the gunman continued into the afternoon, with Finnish media warning he was "armed and dangerous," until officers found his body at his home in Espoo. He had shot himself.

"The four victims in the shopping centre were, in a way, outsiders. It looks like the incident is linked to the fifth victim," said police chief inspector Jukka Kaski. "She seems to have been the gunman's main target. The whole shooting is tied up with the relationship between her and the gunman," he added. Kaski said the ex-girlfriend had taken out a restraining order against Shkupolli.

Shkupolli, a Kosovan immigrant who had been living for several years in Finland, was known to the police, said Kaski. He said the weapon used was an unlicensed handgun. YLE reported that Shkupolli had been fined in 2003 and 2007 for illegally possessing a firearm.

The bloodshed will raise further alarm in Finland, after the third mass shooting in two years.

In November 2007, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen opened fire at his high school in the town of Jokela, around 40 miles north of Helsinki. The shooting came hours after a video believed to have been made by Auvinen and predicting a school massacre was posted on YouTube.

He killed six students, a school nurse and the headteacher, before turning the gun on himself.

Less than a year later, in September 2008, Matti Juhani Saari, a 22-year-old trainee chef, shot and killed 10 students at the Kauhajoki school of hospitality, 180 miles north-west of Helsinki, before shooting himself dead. Saari had been detained by police the day before the shooting after concern over videos he had posted on YouTube. One showed Saari posing with a Walther P22 pistol, and he listed clips of the 1999 Columbine school shootings in the US among his favourites.

Restrictions on gun ownership were tightened after this attack, with applicants having to train for at least a year at a gun club, as well as providing a doctor's statement on their mental health and sitting an interview with police, before being allowed a handgun.

According to Finland's national firearms register in 2007, 649,996 people had a weapons permit and there were 1,622,100 guns in circulation among the country's 5.3 million population. The country ranks among the top five nations in the world for civilian gun ownership.

Finland's president, Tarja Halonen, and the prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, sent their condolences to the relatives of Shkupolli's victims. In his message, Vanhanen noted the large number of handguns in Finland and vowed that the killings would be thoroughly investigated, "with particular focus on the unlicensed gun and how the shooter obtained it".

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